Disney Announces First Marvel Animated Feature

Walt Disney Animation has announced their first feature-length animated film based on a Marvel property Big Hero 6. Inspired by a little-known Japan-set Marvel series about a team of state-sanctioned superheroes, the film will center on a boy named Hiro Hamada and his beloved robot companion BayMax who join a team of crime fighters in a mythical mashup high-tech city called San Fransokyo.

This will be Walt Disney Animation Studios first movie inspired by a Marvel comic book series, an obscure 1998 series written by Steven T. Seagle and Duncan Roulea. Disney bought the comic book company Marvel earlier in the year.

The film is directed by Winnie the Pooh director Don Hall. Hall, a lifelong comic book fan who started at Disney Animation in 1995, was in the midst of directing “Winnie the Pooh” when Disney acquired Marvel in 2009. He found “Big Hero 6″ while digging through Marvel’s library for ideas and pitched it to Disney’s chief creative officer, John Lasseter, in 2011.